Keeping the Squeeze on Government Expenditure
Statement made by Adrian Wimmers, Partner, KPMG
Today’s Budget signifies a further step in the Government’s ‘sinking-lid’ approach to stemming a decade long trend of
government expenditure increasing relative to GDP.
The Government’s stated agenda is to shift New Zealand’s economic focus to savings, productive investment and exports.
An area of focus of this budget is to tighten the squeeze on low productivity, core government expenditure and return
this expenditure to investment on high priority frontline services, infrastructure or to reducing deficits.
In doing this the government intends to release resources to the productive sectors and so increase New Zealand’s
capacity for sustained economic growth.
In this Government’s two previous Budgets, public sector expenditure was, in the main, tackled through pressure on
departmental expenditure, in essence the cost of running the Wellington bureaucracy. In particular the Government
focused on reducing costs in the ‘back office’ – roughly 10 per cent of departmental spend – and redirecting savings to
frontline services such as the police, nurses and teachers. This focus continues.
Government departments are expected to find a further $980m over three years once they absorb the impact of staff
retirement scheme costs, previously funded centrally. The Government has also signalled that further negotiation of
savings targets will follow after the Budget.
It is clear that the expectation of further value for money savings won’t disappear under this Government. This means
more services and better advice with fewer resources. To achieve this, Government departments will need to focus on new
ways to use their resources more efficiently and effectively – from the back office right up to the front line.
Many departments have yet to grasp this particular nettle with both hands. Savings to date have generally represented
the ‘low hanging fruit’ rather than smarter changes such as fundamentally rethinking business processes and service
delivery models.
Budget 2011 has signalled that the Government expects officials to achieve harder-to-get savings on top of the easier
ones already delivered. The challenge they face is that long-term improvement, whether delivered through a merger or a
new IT system, requires investment to realise the gains.
This creates an immediate conundrum for the Government. Smarter delivery of public services has an up-front price that
will need to be found within the reduced government spending track announced today.
ENDS